Transverse revival and fractional revival of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss bunching effect with discrete chaotic light

摘要

We studied the Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) bunching effect of discrete chaotic light sources. It is found that, for periodical discrete chaotic light sources, the HBT bunching effect collapses first but then revives repeatedly at specific transverse distances between two detectors in the far-field detection plane, which is very different from the HBT bunching effect with a spatially continuous chaotic light source. Such transverse revivals of the HBT bunching effect are the result of in-phase superposition of all discrete two-photon eigen modes of the periodical discrete chaotic light sources. In addition to the integer HBT bunching revival, the fractional HBT bunching revival can also be observed with nonperiodical discrete chaotic light sources due to the in-phase constructive interference of parts of the two-photon eigen modes. Experimental verification on both the integer and the fractional HBT bunching revivals are given. The transverse revival and fractional revival of the HBT bunching effect provide an efficient way for imaging processing such as ghost image copy in the detection plane.